Pakistan’s Nuclear Options

Abstract

Pakistan’s technical progress toward some sort of atom bomb capability is now almost universally recognized.1 Questions remain about whether Pakistan has the intent or capacity to produce militarily serviceable nuclear devices, or even whether its reckoning is military at all. But few doubt that Pakistan is a nuclear threshhold state in some sense, or that its leaders wish to convey an impression that it is nuclear-weapon-capable in some fashion.2 If that impression is also consciously enigmatic, it may have some virtue for Pakistan partly because it invites the sort of speculation this chapter involves. And if the world believes Pakistan is nuclear-weapon-capable, that belief acquires a life of its own. Beliefs become facts in politics, and political facts have political consequences. The question of what are Pakistan’s nuclear options is, in part, a question about what Pakistan wishes to do with the political facts and what political consequences it hopes for.

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Notes

1.

Rodney W. Jones, The Proliferation of Small Nuclear Forces. Report for the Defense Nuclear Agency (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies, 30 April 1984) pp. 22–23Google Scholar

For a rigorous discussion of motivations and incentives for proliferation and nonproliferation, see Stephen M. Meyer, The Dynamics of Nuclear Proliferation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984).Google Scholar